Deep Work – why lawyers need to work better as AI looms…
When I was at university and I was writing an essay a typical day would be I would leave my student accommodation in the morning I would go to a library and work in a quiet, isolated environment in 45 minute - 1 hour sessions reading and writing, with short breaks in between. The point of going to the library was that you couldn’t talk to anyone, you couldn’t really look at your phone, it was harder to use the internet for distraction and for an extended period of time you were able to think about something which was challenging and try and create a solution. To produce something of a high standard it might take several days of that routine.
That was the typical way the vast majority of people worked at university because in order do something that is cognitively demanding and creative you need to focus on it intensely, without thinking about anything else. It would be impossible to complete a university degree in any subject without the discipline of long periods of totally uninterrupted silent focus.
However, the current world of work is very different. Now knowledge workers, perhaps particularly lawyers, rarely if ever have days, hours, or sometimes even minutes of uninterrupted focus on a single task.
Instead the style of work that is almost universally adopted for most private practice and in-house lawyers (and even increasingly members of the bar) is one which depends on constant connectivity with other people. Email, Slack (any instant messaging), WhatsApp, Teams and Zoom meetings, social media, live documents, even just picking up the phone whenever it rings….
A major metric (perhaps now the metric) by which lawyers are judged is their responsiveness to these tools. Being always available, always responsive , turning to things ‘quickly’, being able to ‘juggle’ several things at once is often lauded as being the defining trait of the best lawyers.
Indeed it is now often assumed that if you are a ‘good enough’ lawyer you should be able to do all these things simultaneously without it compromising the quality of your substantive work (i.e. the core skill which you trained to do and are ultimately paid to deliver).
A book by a Georgetown University computer science professor, Cal Newport, ‘Deep Work: rules for focused success in a distracted world’ challenges that assumption.
Newport’s central thesis is that unless knowledge workers re-discover the ability to practice ‘Deep Work’ the technological advancements of computing and AI may render many of the current ‘shallow’ skills of workplace connectivity and responsiveness valueless. It is a timely intervention for all lawyers to take note of….
What is Shallow Work and Deep Work and why do we need to work deeply?
Newport starts with two definitions:
Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill and are hard to replicate.
Shallow work: Non-cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.
He explains that one of the major trends of the last 10 -15 years has been a significant increase in the volume of shallow work that occupies each knowledge worker’s day but also an increase in the value that companies appear to place on maintaining a high output of these tasks as a symbol of productivity.
There are a number of reasons for this which are almost all connected with the rise of internet-based tools for communication. Newport identifies four main causes:
The Metric Black Hole: although ‘Shallow Work’ is very visible it is often impossible to accurately measure whether it contributes to the bottom line of the business. It is even more difficult to assess whether the distraction caused by increased Shallow Work at the expense of Deep Work reduces the overall value being produced.
The Principle of Least Resistance: in a business setting, without clear evidence for what work affects the bottom line, we will all tend towards behaviours that are easiest in the moment (think contributing immediately to an email chain, suggesting a call, asking for someone else’s views, reviewing something quickly).
Busyness as a Proxy for Productivity: in the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs many knowledge workers turn back to an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.
The Cult of the Internet: Almost every business considers it is beneficial for its workers to be more connected to the internet (email being the obvious frontrunner) and more visible on all internet platforms (social media etc.).
The problem that Newport identifies is that with ever increasing amounts of Shallow Work knowledge workers have less time to think deeply, to create real value and to learn hard skills at precisely the time when it is vital to do so for two main reasons:
We need to be able to learn more complex things quickly: we are currently going through a ‘Great Restructuring’ in which our technologies are racing ahead of our traditional skills and organisations. In an information economy led by AI, workers now need to be able to quickly understand complicated systems and be able to manipulate them skilfully otherwise companies will hire more machines than people. In other words, the realm in which human cognitive power is necessary for simple tasks is shrinking.
The digital revolution means high skilled people are easily accessible: one of the major effects of increased connectivity and the internet is that the most high skilled people are now able to be accessed very easily by everyone worldwide. I.e. if what you are producing is mediocre then that’s a problem as it’s easy for your target market to find an alternative.
Newport is therefore clear that in order to thrive in this new economy knowledge workers need i) the ability to quickly master hard things and ii) the ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed and these two core abilities require the ability to perform Deep Work.
Why is it necessary to do Deep Work ?
Lawyers of all varieties will be very familiar with this typical scene:
Task: advise client on a call on the effect of a legal document.
Reading detailed document on one screen to prepare for a call in 10 minutes time with client, LinkedIn/ BBC is open on the other screen, meanwhile email notifications are popping up in the bottom right hand side of the screen from other matters which are addressed to you with varying levels of urgency in the subject bar which you glance at for 5 seconds to check that a response is not required immediately, your phone is face up on the desk in front of you and occasionally flashes with a work or personal update on WhatsApp which again you glance at as necessary, your telephone rings with a colleague asking an incidental question about the call you are preparing for. Another colleague comes to your desk to ask about a separate meeting that is happening later in the day.
While this method of work is obviously necessary at certain times to service the inevitable competing demands of different clients it is clearly not optimal. It is also obviously a far cry from the way that most of us learnt to study law as students.
The problem is that to really master a cognitively demanding task Newport notes that all the scientific research on the subject suggests that this type of distracted, hyper-reactive style of work is bad news:
‘The reason…why it’s important to focus intensely on the task at hand while avoiding distraction is because this is the only way to isolate the relevant neural circuit to trigger useful myelination (the new science of performance argues that you get better at a skill as you develop more myelin around the relevant neurons). By contrast, if you’re trying to learn a complex new skill in a state of low concentration…you’re firing too many circuits simultaneously and haphazardly to isolate the group of neurons you actually want to strengthen… To learn, in other words, is an act of deep work’.
Scientists who have studied the effects of multitasking have also identified the phenomenon of ‘attention residue’ which means that when workers switch from Task A to Task B (even if briefly) your attention doesn’t immediately follow, instead a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task.
This is why it’s hard to remember the full contents of a document you have read if you have been glancing at emails at the same time when reading it or you have been interrupted by a phone call.
So what are the advantages of Deep Work:
1. Working at an elite level: to think creatively and seriously about a legal problem, to be fully engaged with a client on a call or in a meeting or to devise a business proposal from scratch it is impossible to do these tasks at our best unless we are fully engaged on the issue in front of us. To produce at an elite level we need the right conditions to engage in Deep Work and to think properly to allow us to make connections, rationalise clearly and articulate the issues fully.
2. Work is more meaningful and satisfying: Numerous psychological studies on work reveal that we experience the most meaning and satisfaction in our work when we are in a state of what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes as a ‘flow state’ where ‘a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile’. In other words, it is hard to ‘lose ourself’ in our work and feel we are producing something of real value at the edge of our potential if we are distracted.
How do we do Deep Work in the modern world?
One of the key points that Newport makes is that the reason it is important to proactively set aside time to do ‘Deep Work’ (rather than just to try and generally work hard throughout the day) is because decades of psychological research shows that: we have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as we use it.
In other words, your will power to resist the temptation to: check social media, flick back to your email inbox, read BBC news, do some other work which is not the work you are supposed to be doing, make a coffee, go to the loo, check WhatsApp is like a muscle which gets tired.
The key to Deep Work is to set up a series of rituals and rules which allow you to minimise the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into a state of unbroken concentration (i.e. if you have spent the last three hours flicking between emails and calls it is very hard to choose to focus on a cognitively demanding task without wanting to just revert back to another stimulus).
The 5 rules of Deep Work
1. Eliminate distractions: during Deep Work sessions eliminate all other distractions, no phone, no email, no social media, no interruptions.
2. Deep Work periods need to be scheduled (routinely): there will always be competing demands on your time and another task to be distracted by and so the best way to complete Deep Work sessions is to diarise them, block out the time like you are attending a meeting you can’t miss. Start with just 3 or 4 sessions a week and try and build up.
3. Use a timer: our limited willpower only allows us to focus intensely for short bursts of time. Can be as little as 25 minutes but probably should be no more than an hour. The beauty of a clock timer is that it forces you to get to the end of the time period rather than breaking focus early. The timer removes the mental debate of ‘can I just check my email quickly?’ because there is an end in sight to do so. I use 25 minute/ 45 minute Pomodoro timers on Youtube.
4. Keep a scoreboard: you will always have a greater incentive to undertake a Deep Work session if you have a score or a goal or tally to keep for the week or month. Keeping score of the hours also has the benefit of linking achievement to undertaking a session itself rather than working towards an end product, like finishing a memo or drafting a report (which can take much longer and be harder to define as an immediate success).
5. Have downtime: there is a finite time we can work with real focused intensity (Newport says that the research suggests it may be only 4 hours a day) and so not only do we need to recharge but also decisions or problems that involve large amounts of information and multiple vague, and perhaps conflicting ideas, are suited for your unconscious mind to reflect on and try and solve outside of a focused session (the science actually suggests this may be the reason why we have our best ideas in the shower).
What other strategies are there to encourage Deep Work?
One of the key points that Newport makes is that the ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained outside of sitting at a desk. The problem is that our minds have increasingly been trained for a dependence on distraction. The impulse to check our phone, our email, social media is addictive and constant:
‘It’s instead the constant switching from low-stimuli/ high value activities to high stimuli/low value activities at the slightest hint of boredom or cognitive challenge that teaches your mind never to tolerate an absence of novelty. This constant switching can be understood analogously as weakening the mental muscles responsible for organising the many sources vying for your attention. By segregating internet use (and therefore segregating distractions) you’re minimising the number of times you give in to distraction, and by doing so you let these attention seeking muscles strengthen.’
Newport’s point is that in order for us to get good at Deep work we need to practice the skill of resisting distraction. There are a couple of main ways we can do this:
Schedule specific blocks of time to process emails / go on the internet rather than constantly checking your phone and inbox.
Limit unnecessary looking at phone if you are sat idle/ waiting for something (i.e. resist the urge at on the tube/ coffee shop/between calls to scroll).
Meditate productively.
I think this last idea is really interesting. Newport proposes that one way to make our Deep Work sessions productive outside of traditional working time is to take a task like going for a walk, being at the gym, doing housework and use that time to focus your mind on a single work problem or creative idea you would like to solve. Rather than letting your thoughts wander idly or reverting to looking at your phone, instead meditate deliberately on something you want to consider more carefully :
‘By forcing you to resist distraction and return your attention repeatedly to a well-defined problem, it helps strengthen your distraction- resisting muscles and by forcing you to push your focus deeper and deeper on a single problem, it sharpens your concentration’.
I went for a walk recently without a phone and thought only about a single work problem for ten minutes – it was actually a really useful and a fairly relaxing way to work.
Conclusion
In an age of constant connectivity it is very easy to exist as a lawyer on autopilot, reacting and responding to the next immediate demand is an easy way to work hard, but it might not be the best way.
To build something of value, to build something which it is difficult for technology to replace requires thought and to think requires Deep Work.